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The Ravishes Of Time
2 August 2018
We pass by this iron railing regularly but the other day we stooped to take a photo of it. We've been mesmerized by the effect the salt air has had on the iron over the years.
Time. A Nikon D200 capture at f5, 1/1600 second and ISO 400 at 40mm on an 18-200mm Nikkor.
If you've ever been to Alcatraz, you're familiar with the phenomenon from seeing iron staircases that the salt air has turned into lacework.
As we worked on it in Adobe Camera Raw, we thought of the iron as a metaphor for the intransigence of certain opinions in the face of the facts.
You can read that several ways but what we had in mind at that particular moment was a discussion forum in which Capture One was hailed as the only way to process Raw files, "the standard in professional photography."
There's something refreshing about salt air.
What nonsense.
A few months ago in our piece titled Neighbors, we actually demonstrated just what nonsense that position is by processing the same Raw data in several different applications.
As we said then, "The trick, really, is providing comfortable tools to do it [edit the image]. And the catch (because there always is one) is that the operator has to know what they want and can get out of the image."
That's us throwing a little salt into the air.
Further proving the point, Martin Evening pointed out a long time ago, you can set Lightroom to deliver the same default conversion Capture One provides. His article provides step-by-step instructions for creating a Lightroom preset to do just that.
Of course, if you just open the image data in the application and only evaluate the default conversion, you may believe one application is significantly better than another.
But you can manipulate that same Raw data to the same degree in any of these Raw converters, as our earlier article shows. They just start from different places.
There's something refreshing about salt air. And it's encouraging to see it work its magic on something as intransigent as iron.
It gives a fellow hope for the future.